I never cease to be amazed at how quickly the world of ad-tech evolves and this is especially apparent if I look back over Yospace’s experience at the last few NAB Shows.

What was striking this year was just how few meetings I was in that required a demo. This is a big change to a couple of years ago and I put this down to the fact that server-side ad insertion has become a well understood technology. In its basic form anyway.

It’s also nice from a Yospace perspective that nobody questions whether it works anymore. A fast-growing customer list helps with that, for sure, but also features such as ad copy normalisation and frame-accuracy come as standard nowadays and people just trust that they work.

Much more common than a demo is the use of a pen and pad to draw out customer-specific workflow diagrams, and it’s in these types of conversations that things get really interesting.

Like many modern tech providers, Yospace’s product map is largely defined by what a customer needs it to be. The tech and the teams that develop it are agile enough to work in this way and we always have an innovative project on the go that pushes the boundaries of what SSAI can be as a result.

We’ve also been able to lead the way in delivering programmatic at scale for live, a process that can become incredibly complex as you scale to millions of simultaneous viewers who all go to ad breaks at the same time.

We developed our prefetch technology to address this use-case in response to the requirements of a leading sports broadcaster. I’m very pleased that today Yospace’s robustness in this area is recognised by so many (you can read more on prefetch in our Go Live white paper).

Achieving scale was the biggest topic we were asked about this year. Others that cropped up a lot included:

Total Video, or the idea of using consistent advertising methods and measurement tools across all content

Prebidding, which is an add-on to prefetch and provides a “look ahead” function for programmatic to ensure the highest value is earned for your inventory

These are areas that I anticipate will continue to be high on people’s agendas at IBC in five months’ time. We’ll have a stand in Hall 14 and it will be great to catch up. And of course, if you’d like to discuss any of the above in the meantime then you can contact us here.

Three days down and less than one to go. The voice is hoarse and the legs are tired but it’s been great to catch up with so many customers, prospects, partners and friends. There’s a real change in the depth of detail of our conversations compared to previous years and it’s reassuring to hear people talk so highly of Yospace for server-side ad insertion, especially in a field where there is increasing competition.

I was very pleased to hear someone say today: “yes they do SSAI but they’re no Yospace.”

For the last day we’re focussing our attention on some of the customer projects that have helped us earn our strong reputation…

Reducing ad load

The rise of OTT has seen many broadcasters urgently need to monetise online, and the challenge of retaining an audience has meant that a number of broadcasters have moved to reduce advertising with longer term benefits in mind. This is exactly what our customer Medialaan did on its live streams. The innovative European broadcaster allowed viewers on its Stievie service were able to rewind a live stream then receive shorter ad breaks to allow them to catch up with the live programming sooner.

The result was more engaged viewers, longer viewing sessions, and ultimately more ad breaks viewed. Read about this more in our Medialaan case study.

Enhanced player support

The challenge of scaling live sports and their unpredictability demands any advertising system employed by a broadcaster to be both robust and versatile. Typically up to 90% of viewers tune into a football game within five minutes of kick-off, and it’s in situations like this that our pre-fetch system is crucial (read more about this in our Day One blog).

In addition to this, our SSAI enabled the broadcaster to monetise streams within an enhanced player and deliver on its ambitions to put the viewer front and centre of the action. Read more here.

Seven case study

Australian broadcaster Seven live streamed all 16 courts of the Australian Open. Thanks to Yospace’s ability to feed back live telemetry data, Seven was able to prioritise the advertising based on the state of play of each court at any one time.

Welcome to Las Vegas. Despite being home to a hundred resorts and 150,000 hotel rooms, it feels like I know everyone here during NAB week – whether it’s bumping into a customer in the cab queue or taking a table next to a tech partner – the broadcast engineering industry seems to take over the city during the event.

Our focus for the first day of NAB is scaling programmatic for major live events. In order to maximise ad revenues, programmatic systems need adequate time to respond in a major live event set up, and this need is especially apparent in a low latency environment.

Programmatic vs. Low Latency

The ability to scale live SSAI and to plan for future scale, in an environment where all viewers see an ad break at the same time, is really important but is made more complex as there are two opposing forces at play:

The need to allow programmatic platforms the time they need to respond to fully realise the value of the ad inventory

Low latency support, which shortens the time available to the programmatic ecosystem

To maximise the revenue opportunity, it’s necessary to make ad decisioning calls in an orderly fashion way ahead of the actual break taking place. Our prefetch system allows ad calls to be made early, allowing the time needed to return a full pod of ads for each viewer, and this is a crucial element of our offering that we’ve been sharing with visitors to our booth at the show.

Once you have prefetch in place you can plan for advanced programmatic; the next opportunity to explore is prebidding. Prebidding replicates the benefits of web header bidding for video. By calling all supply-side platforms simultaneously, we can inform the ad server of the responses to help it make an informed decision on which ads to place and ensure the highest available CPM can be secured.

Swedish broadcaster TV4 has long been a leader in the broadcast space, from going digital in the noughties and its early adoption of server-side ad insertion (SSAI) technology, to forming key partnerships with broadcasters and operators to grow its audience and boost ad revenue.

TV4’s innovative approach is paying off, too. In the press release that announced the renewal of its contract with Yospace, the company’s COO Mathias Berg revealed that the company achieved its highest ever revenue in 2018. He credited the ability to provide a platform-agnostic experience for advertisers across all video as a key factor, an experience that is enabled by SSAI.

TV4’s record earnings, at SEK 1,382 million (€112,537,903), were up 35.2% on 2017, making it one of the most successful broadcasters on the continent.

How did the broadcaster achieve these heights? And how did it use SSAI to carve out its route to a profitable future – for TV4, for advertisers, and for its audience?

Digital ad stitching

TV4’s forward-thinking approach was apparent when it became the first broadcaster in Sweden to implement SSAI, notably adopting the technology for both live and on demand content to deliver a consistent TV quality viewing experience, with one to one addressability and ad measurement.

SSAI has allowed TV4 to unlock new revenue opportunities by allowing for consistent monetisation of all its content across all connected devices, and for viewer data to be harnessed to inform and deliver addressable advertising. This is a sector which shows no signs of slowing, with addressable TV ad spend forecast to exceed $3 billion by the close of this year.

Reinvention and investment

TV4’s CEO Casten Almqvist recognised back in 2012 that in order to outstrip the competition in Sweden’s TV market, the network must “continue to reinvent” itself, investing in its digital service TV4Play, while continuing to focus on “breadth, diversity and quality” and producing “engaging TV for the whole country”.

This prompted TV4 to turn to SSAI soon after, which in turn paved the way for another innovative move last year. A first in Sweden, TV4 collaborated with Telia, Discovery Networks and Modern Times Group (MTG) in March 2018 to launch a targeted advertising initiative on Telia’s Play service. This delivers tailored advertising based on an individual’s location, the channel they’re watching, the kind of screen and the type of device they’re using to stream content.

Later the same year, TV4’s adoption of SSAI allowed it to secure distribution deals with other major distributors including Com Hem.

TV4 is clearly a pioneer, with a data-driven, viewer-first approach to growing its business and monetising content for the long-term, an approach that has been enabled by SSAI. In fact, TV4 has precisely pinpointed its adoption of SSAI for helping it achieve that aforementioned record 2018, with Mathias Berg, COO at TV4 Group commenting that, “as a result of a successful implementation of this strategy TV4 delivered its best financial result in terms of turnover and profitability in the history of the company.”

And with the broadcaster continuing to innovate, then long may this continue.

In a previous post I discussed the concept of “prefetch” for live streams. In this post I’m discussing “prebidding” which is an add-on to prefetch, so if you haven’t read the prefetch post yet I suggest you go through that first – you can find it here.

“Prebidding” is analogous to the concept of “h​eader bidding”, an approach to selecting advertising demand that has become very popular because of its ability to optimise advertising revenues on websites. Header bidding allows advertisers to participate in an online auction for placement on the page while the page is being loaded.

In practical terms, individual advertisers do not participate in the auction, but instead bids are aggregated by systems called Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) which in turn solicit bids from Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs). It is with the DSP, that the advertiser (or their buying agent) establishes the commercial contract for payment on placement.

Until the concept of header bidding came along, a webpage would get advertisements from a first-party ad server (for example, DoubleClick for Publishers) which would be set-up to define a ‘pecking order’ of SSPs or DSPs that would be given the opportunity to place an ad. If an SSP or DSP couldn’t place an ad, the next SSP/DSP in line would be given the opportunity.

There were a number of problems with this approach. The first was that this cascade could simply take a long time to execute. The second was that it didn’t reflect the fact that the best price could come back from any of the SSPs in the chain – only the first price above the publisher’s bid floor was used, not the best price. And finally, the further down the pecking order an SSP/DSP would be the less insight into how many placement opportunities a given publisher was able to supply.

Having an accurate idea of how many placement opportunities a given publisher is making available is critical to optimising the bid responses. Header bidding allows all SSPs or DSPs to be treated equally by calling to them simultaneously, rather than in a cascade, meaning the best price across all SSPs can be seen and everyone gets to see the placement opportunities and, importantly for the user experience, it’s faster.

Prebidding takes this concept of header bidding to video advertising inserted into a live broadcast stream. In live streaming multiple ad breaks can be viewed by the same user during a single streaming session. This new logic exists inside the Yospace system that is responsible for delivering the stream to the user rather than the header of a web page, hence why the feature is named “prebidding” and not “header bidding”.

The system also solves another issue for the broadcaste, which is the separation of advertising by industry type. If, for example, the first ad in an ad pod (ad break) is a first-party sold automotive ad, prebidding allows the ad server to ensure that no other automotive ad is included in that pod. In addition, if an automotive ad comes back from the SSPs at a higher CPM than the first-party sold ad then the ad server could swap out the first-party sold ad, if the broadcaster configured it to do so. Obviously, there are many nuances to where a broadcaster would want to prioritise higher-priced third party advertising over their own sold ads, but the technology would let them do this.

Until now a typical workflow for server-side ad insertion (SSAI) for live streams has looked like the first workflow here (1. Typical SSAI ad calls):

As you can see from the diagram, the ADS has not had visibility in advance of the SSP decisions. It decides which ad in the pod are to be programmatic but without the foresight to know the CPM or content type of the programmatic ads that are to be stitched into the stream.

In the second diagram (2. Typical prebidding SSAI ad calls), prebidding allows the ADS to see the CPMs and ad types returned by SSPs in the ad call from the SSAI system (Yospace). As a result the ADS is able to make a fully informed decision on which ads to place, resulting in realising the maximum value of the ad pod while ensuring an advertisers message is not diluted.

The 2019 NAB Show is fast approaching and we at Yospace are looking forward to exhibiting at the event for a seventh time. Here’s a quick overview of what we’ll be talking about and our activity in and around the show.

The focus of our show will be on two main topics: best practice for implementing server-side ad insertion (SSAI), and realising the ad revenue opportunities once SSAI is in place.

There will be four demo pods on the booth, two of which will be dedicated to best practice in implementing SSAI for live and VoD.

The other two will showcase some of the possibilities of what you can achieve once you have the right SSAI foundation in place.

These will consist of a shared demo with programmatic specialist SpotX that looks at the concept of prebidding to achieve maximum ad value, and another, with Capella Systems, that will focus on how to scale up and monetise multiple channels during major live events.

Here’s what else will be happening during the show:

Yospace Founder and CTO David Springall will be speaking live to Akamai TV: Tuesday, 10.00am

David will also be speaking on the Bitmovin booth, discussing our joint support for HLS+fMP4 and integration with the Bitmovin player: Wednesday, 3.30pm

Unified Streaming Platform will be showcasing Yospace’s SSAI for MPEG-DASH on their booth

I’ll be sharing insights on all of these topics throughout the show on our LinkedIn and Twitter feeds. And you can check back here for a daily update post at the end of each day.

The leading SSAI provider will showcase the latest developments in monetizing live and VoD content, with new features to optimise yield from programmatic demand, low latency live streaming, MPEG-DASH, CMAF and data security.

At the show, Yospace will be showcasing how to scale programmatic with low latency for major live events; implement a joined-up monetization strategy across live and VoD; monetize DRM-protected content using MPEG-DASH or HLS with CMAF; protect first-party viewer data from exposure to third parties.

Scaling programmatic for major live eventsProgrammatic systems need adequate time to respond in a major live event scenario. This need is especially apparent in a low latency environment. Yospace’s innovative prefetch system allows ad calls to be made early, allowing the time needed to return a full pod of ads for each viewer.

PrebiddingYospace’s latest feature is prebidding which replicates the benefits of web header bidding for video. By calling all supply-side platforms (SSPs) simultaneously, the highest available CPM can be secured for each ad spot. Prebidding is built upon Yospace’s prefetching capabilities which means its revenue maximisation benefits can be realised at broadcast scale.

Server-Side Ad Insertion for VoDYospace has seen a considerable increase over the past year in operators and MVPDs implementing SSAI for VoD ito deliver viewing experience consistency throughout their device platforms. Yospace will be explaining how these customers have realised the advantage provided by the decoupling of the ad decisioning ecoystem from the device platforms.

MPEG-DASH and HLS with CMAFEffective digital rights management (DRM) is crucial to any rights-holders of sought-after sports content and this has driven interest in SSAI for MPEG-DASH. Yospace was the first SSAI provider to announce support for MPEG-DASH and now boasts several live examples. Yospace also supports HLS delivery with CMAF which is becoming a preferred option for broadcasters who value the simplicity of the HLS protocol.

Data SecuritySSAI provides a middleware layer between the broadcaster’s app and the advertising ecosystem. The effect of this is significant because it prevents an ad server from having direct access to the app and its user, preventing the risk of user information being exposed and re-targeted by a third party at a lower price.

Yospace will be exhibiting on booth SU3414. To make an appointment with the team, please visit: www.yospace.com/nab